Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space

“Ishtar Lands On Mars”

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This is a cruel headline at the Gray Lady.

I haven’t seen the movie (we were actually thinking about seeing it this weekend, but a combination of Patricia being under the weather and sticker shock at the prices for the 3D/Imax kept us away for now. But nowhere in the article does it really say, or at least support the notion, that it’s a bad movie (a Ishtar undeniably was, in addition to being a box-office flop) — it’s a business failure in that they spent too much in making it. The criticism that it “…was a bewildering mash-up, starting during the Civil War and moving to the Old West before leaping to a planet called Barsoom (Mars), home to tusked, four-armed creatures called Tharks,” sounds just like the book to me, which is an SF classic and the inspiration for much of the great SF in the twentieth century (including Star Wars, to the degree that it’s more than space opera). It seems as though perhaps the critics aren’t capable of handling complex story lines. Certainly, John Miller thinks differently.

Anyway, I hope that it does make its money back — I’d like to see it have sequels.

Oh, and speaking of SF, Sarah Hoyt has a review of (occasional commenter) Rick Locke’s new book, which looks like a good read.

[Late Sunday evening update]

Bruce Webster has a more extensive, mixed review.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bambi Versus Godzilla

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Watching Mark Steyn go after Sandra Fluke is almost, but not quite enough for me to take pity on her:

…the most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility. It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite simply nuts.

…Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex insists that everyone take it seriously. When it emerged the other day that Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old Michigan million-dollar-lottery winner, still receives $200 of food stamps every month, even the press and the bureaucrats were obliged to acknowledge the ridiculousness. Yet the same people are determined that Sandra Fluke be treated with respect as a pioneering spokesperson for the rights of the horizontally challenged.

Like him, I pass.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Prayer Meeting

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…for the purpose of bending religion to the will of the State:

The Obama administration has just put into force a new regulation under Obamacare that amounts to the most far-reaching instance of governmental religious intolerance since the Blaine Amendments. There is no other word but intolerance to describe what the rule aims to do: It doesn’t say that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs —- which of course they do have in our country. It doesn’t even say that the government should facilitate people’s access to these drugs —- which of course it does today and has for many years, at great public expense. It says, rather, that the Catholic Church and others who have religious objections to the use of such drugs should facilitate people’s access to them. It says that we will not tolerate an institution in our society that, for religious reasons, is not willing to actively put into effect the views of those in power regarding contraception, abortion, and sterilization——that we won’t just let it be and find other ways to put those views into effect but will compel the dissenting institution itself to participate in the facilitation of access to these things on behalf of the people it employs, or else we will levy a heavy fine against it. We cannot abide even passive disagreement. That is a refusal to exercise even a moderate portion of toleration toward religious believers and institutions. It says, in effect, that the substance of religious convictions merits no regard from the state. And yet it seems that the forms of religious practice can be marshaled in the service of political objectives. The prayer vigil as PR stunt is expected to coexist with rank intolerance as public policy, and the White House itself is encouraging the stunt.

Without their hypocrisy and power hunger, they’d have nothing.